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144144Democracy Now! - Uraniumen-USDemocracy Now! - UraniumBirthplace of Atomic Bomb, New Mexico Remains Center of Massive U.S. Nuclear Arsenalhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/11/birthplace_of_atomic_bomb_new_mexico
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-11:en/story/9763e6 AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re in our 100-city tour here in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Yes, we are broadcasting from Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. We&#8217;re here at the historic Fuller Lodge, built in 1928 as a boarding school for boys. Gore Vidal was one of the better-known students here. The school was taken over by the U.S. government in 1943 to house the scientists for the Manhattan Project, the secret military program based here that produced the first U.S. nuclear weapon. The work was led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. This is Oppenheimer speaking shortly after the first bomb was tested in southern New Mexico in 1945.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER : I have been asked whether in the years to come it will be possible to kill 40 million American people in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night. I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes.
AMY GOODMAN : J. Robert Oppenheimer would later say, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, &quot;I am the shatterer of worlds.&quot; Less than a month after the first atomic bomb test, the U.S. dropped a uranium bomb known as Little Boy over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing up to 130,000 people. Three days later, Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, was detonated over Nagasaki. Later in his life, J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the &quot;Father of the Atomic Bomb,&quot; warned the public about its terrifying power. In a 1965 television broadcast, he reflected on witnessing the first test nuclear explosion 20 years earlier.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER : A few people laughed, a few people cried. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: &quot;Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.&quot; I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
AMY GOODMAN : J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the Manhattan Project that developed the only two atomic bombs dropped on cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Well, today, the place that was home to the dawn of the Nuclear Age still maintains America&#8217;s biggest nuclear arsenal. Los Alamos National Laboratory is the nation&#8217;s foremost nuclear weapons lab.
Los Alamos is only part of the nuclear story of New Mexico. The state&#8217;s long history of uranium mining on Native American lands provides fuel for the front end of the nuclear industry. It also stores much of the radioactive waste from nuclear weapons and power plants.
To talk more about this radioactive legacy that continues into the present, we&#8217;re joined by three guests. Jay Coghlan is executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Chuck Montaño is a former investigator and auditor at Los Alamos who faced retaliation after he blew the whistle on wasteful spending and fraud at the lab. And soon we&#8217;ll be joined by Leona Morgan, a coordinator with the group Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining—their mission, to protect the water, air, land and health of communities in areas impacted by uranium mines.
Welcome, all, to Democracy Now! Let&#8217;s begin, Jay, with you. Give us a tour of where we are right now. We are sitting in the Fuller Lodge.
JAY COGHLAN : That is correct. And to zero in nationally, here you are on this 100-city tour across the country, but, of course, today you&#8217;re not in just any town. As you put it, we&#8217;re in the birthplace of atomic and nuclear weapons. Now, specifically, we&#8217;re sitting in the historic Fuller Lodge. You invoked the name of J.R. Oppenheimer, who was director of the Manhattan Project. I recall seeing another physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics, Hans Bethe, basically the man who figured out how the sun works, through nuclear fusion. But approximately—oh, I&#8217;d say about a dozen years ago, before he died, he gave a talk here in Fuller Lodge on the abolition of nuclear weapons, for which he was an advocate, speaking to Los Alamos employees. And afterwards, I just remember him standing on the veranda here at Fuller Lodge shaking his head, going, &quot;They just don&#8217;t understand.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : And so, what happens here now?
JAY COGHLAN : Well, right now, as we&#8217;ve both noted, this is the birthplace of atomic and nuclear weapons. What the public doesn&#8217;t really understand is that the nuclear weapons business is very much ongoing, that funding for nuclear weapons programs within the Department of Energy is nearly 50 percent above the historic average of the Cold War. And this is within the Department of Energy, not necessarily Pentagon funding. But again, what I&#8217;m attempting to underline is the very fact that, despite the rhetoric that this country and others are working towards a future world free of nuclear weapons, on the ground what is happening is that the U.S. is rebuilding the production side of its nuclear weapons complex. And specifically here at Los Alamos, it is for the future expanded production of the plutonium cores of nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN : What&#8217;s your problem with that?
JAY COGHLAN : Well, you know, first of all, I&#8217;m an outright advocate for the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. As the president said in Prague close to four years ago, we&#8217;re going to have to maintain those weapons while we work towards eventual global disarmament. But what&#8217;s happening through so-called life extension programs is that the U.S. is extending the service life of its nuclear weapons on the order of three decades, while endowing them with new military capabilities. And the costs, themselves, are staggering. We&#8217;re ending up with nuclear weapons that just to refurbish cost more than their weight in gold.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to actually go to President Obama. It was soon after he came into office in 2009.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : So, today, I state clearly and with conviction America&#8217;s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;A world without nuclear weapons.&quot; Jay Coghlan?
JAY COGHLAN : Well, you know, first of all, that is extremely laudable. But I do want to point out that this is truly a bipartisan thing. And who perhaps politically was the foremost abolitionist of all? It was Ronald Reagan. And back in the late &#39;80s, he and Gorbachev came within inches of a bilateral deal to begin to eradicate the world, to save the world, from the scourge of nuclear weapons. Now, having said that, the thing that essentially prevented the deal were the false claims made by the nuclear weapons laboratories—in this particular case, Los Alamos&#39;s sister laboratory, Livermore in California, but false claims being made over Star Wars. And that&#8217;s essentially what prevented Reagan from finally striking a deal with Gorbachev to rid the world of nuclear weapons. But I use this to point out the ongoing role of the three nuclear weapons laboratories in this country and the inordinate and, I would say, unfavorable influence that they have, not only on national but also international nuclear weapons policies.
AMY GOODMAN : Who runs the lab now?
JAY COGHLAN : Well, specifically, it&#8217;s being run for the government by a limited liability corporation, which of course is for-profit, which was a change since 2006. But the two dominant partners in this limited liability corporation are the Bechtel Corporation—famous, for example, for attempting to take over the water system in Bolivia, against which there was a popular uprising, so they were kicked out. But again, it&#8217;s the for-profit Bechtel Corporation and the University of California, something which is generally overlooked. But since the beginning, the University of California has been absolutely central to both the development and the ongoing continuation of nuclear weapons programs.
AMY GOODMAN : Chuck Montaño, welcome to Democracy Now! You worked here at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than three decades, for more than 30 years, coming here in 1978. You&#8217;re a whistleblower. You left about a year ago. Can you talk about what you did here, what you learned here, why you blew the whistle?
CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, my background is in audits and fraud investigations, and so I was naturally looking into the control environment at the lab, looking for unallowable costs, excessive spending, cost overruns. And, of course, my—I&#8217;m professionally bound to report things as I find them and to develop work papers that will support my findings. The problem with the Department of Energy weapons complex is that auditors that really do their jobs in accordance with their professional requirements aren&#8217;t really wanted, because there&#8217;s a concern about reporting things that could be an embarrassment to the University of California. As Jay pointed out, the University of California ran the laboratory for 60-some years by itself, until 2006, when it formed a limited liability corporation, and Bechtel brought in Bechtel, the Washington Group and BWXT as industrial partners to run the Los Alamos Lab. But essentially the university maintained a dominant position.
So, my job was to look for fraud, waste and abuse, to look for internal control weaknesses. And what I discovered was that when I reported things as I found them, my reports would get—be held up, would be watered down. Sometimes they wouldn&#8217;t be issued. Taxpayers, of course, pay the price when the laboratory, for example, has procurement arrangements to procure certain items at certain prices, and then we find that vendors are actually selling items to lab employees that lab employees aren&#8217;t supposed to be purchasing or at costs that are much higher than what was contracted. When I brought those issues to surface, I became a problem. And auditors, in general, become a problem when they do that. Back in 2003, in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee situation, there were two seasoned criminal investigators that were brought in, and—
AMY GOODMAN : Wen Ho Lee being the Chinese-American scientist here at Los Alamos who was investigated by the FBI—actually before the 2001 attacks, if people are wondering what the FBI was doing before—saying that he had given secrets to the Chinese, which he adamantly disputed.
CHUCK MONTAÑO: He had not given secrets to anybody, actually. Dr. Wen Ho Lee was scheduled to be laid off along with about a thousand lab employees in 1995. He had received what was referred to as an &quot;at-risk notice.&quot; So at the time he—when he downloaded data, code that he had been working on, he was contemplating having to search for another job. All of that eventually came out, that that was what transpired. But that&#8217;s a—Dr. Lee is an interesting situation, because the downloading of classified information was something that I reported in one of my audit reports. That was a serious internal control weakness at the laboratory. Laboratory chose to ignore fixing that problem. Had the laboratory fixed that problem, then conceivably the Wen Ho Lee situation would have never occurred.
Later on, there were also problems with missing tapes containing classified information. One of my findings in this audit that I did of classified computing at the lab was that the laboratory did not have adequate control over the access of classified information. Vaults were basically open to anybody that wanted to go in, and they could remove items from the classified vault without anybody—without a second person as a witness and without having dual controls in place. That was one of my audit findings that&#8217;s another example where the laboratory chose to ignore some serious control issues that later on led to some serious problems with the laboratory having missing tapes, computer tapes.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about Los Alamos and the millionaires?
CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, Los Alamos—I&#8217;ve lived—I lived in Los Alamos 20 years. I grew up 45 minutes from here, in Santa Fe. We always saw Los Alamos as kind of a very elite community, largely because it&#8217;s very, very educated, and also because the laboratory pays very, very well. Normally, New Mexico is one of the poorest regions in the entire nation. So, as Los Alamos grew up and became a legitimate community in northern New Mexico, they basically—they grew up into a community of millionaires. It&#8217;s been reported repeatedly that Los Alamos has the most millionaires per capita of any community in the nation. And that&#8217;s because the laboratory pays very well. I&#8217;m not so sure the laboratory is doing any cutting-edge research anymore, since the Manhattan Project era days. But the people that come to work at the lab tend to stay until they retire, because retirement benefits are enviable. Surrounding communities, of course, are somewhat envious. There&#8217;s a line of people that would like to work at the lab, largely because of the salary and the benefits. And, of course, the laboratory tends to recruit from throughout the nation.
AMY GOODMAN : How were you retaliated against when you blew the whistle?
CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, the standard practice, of course, is to pull your responsibilities away. In my case, I had all my responsibilities removed. I was put in a cubicle. And I characterize it to a Dilbert comic book episode, where I was just sitting in a cubicle without any work to do, absolutely no assignments for a period of nine months. That changed only after I returned legal representation; it didn&#8217;t change before that. And in fact, in July of 2004, the Los Angeles Times did an article about the lab and the culture of the lab and, in that article, made reference to my situation at the time I&#8217;d been in cubicle isolation for eight months. Even after that article came out, the laboratory did not change its practices with respect to keeping me isolated without any job assignments.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you think it&#8217;s most important for people to know, both about what happened to you and about what you exposed?
CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, I think what&#8217;s imporant is that the taxpayer needs to understand, is that we&#8217;re at the front lines in terms of the employees of these institutions—the auditors, in particular, and investigators. Our job is to root out fraud, waste and abuse and to identify control weaknesses that could lead to fraud, waste and abuse. When we&#8217;re targeted for retaliation for doing our job, the taxpayer ultimately pays the price, with higher costs, cost overruns, secrets that get lost or misplaced and don&#8217;t get reported, health and environmental concern issues. You know, who&#8217;s at the front line, if not the workers, in terms of identifying risky practices that might contaminate the environment or expose workers to high risk, health and safety issues? So, whistleblower protection is critical, especially for facilities like the Los Alamos National Laboratory, because of the nature of the work that&#8217;s done and the kind of materials that they work with.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break and then come back, and we&#8217;ll also be joined by a guest from the Navajo Diné Nation to talk about another part of the nuclear cycle: the uranium mines and what happens when the mines are closed and the tailings are left. Our guests: Chuck Montaño, former inspector here at LANL , the Los Alamos National Lab, who became a whistleblower, and Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: We’re in our 100-city tour here in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Yes, we are broadcasting from Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. We’re here at the historic Fuller Lodge, built in 1928 as a boarding school for boys. Gore Vidal was one of the better-known students here. The school was taken over by the U.S. government in 1943 to house the scientists for the Manhattan Project, the secret military program based here that produced the first U.S. nuclear weapon. The work was led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. This is Oppenheimer speaking shortly after the first bomb was tested in southern New Mexico in 1945.

J. ROBERTOPPENHEIMER: I have been asked whether in the years to come it will be possible to kill 40 million American people in the 20 largest American towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night. I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes.

AMYGOODMAN: J. Robert Oppenheimer would later say, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, "I am the shatterer of worlds." Less than a month after the first atomic bomb test, the U.S. dropped a uranium bomb known as Little Boy over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing up to 130,000 people. Three days later, Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, was detonated over Nagasaki. Later in his life, J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the "Father of the Atomic Bomb," warned the public about its terrifying power. In a 1965 television broadcast, he reflected on witnessing the first test nuclear explosion 20 years earlier.

J. ROBERTOPPENHEIMER: A few people laughed, a few people cried. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

AMYGOODMAN: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the Manhattan Project that developed the only two atomic bombs dropped on cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Well, today, the place that was home to the dawn of the Nuclear Age still maintains America’s biggest nuclear arsenal. Los Alamos National Laboratory is the nation’s foremost nuclear weapons lab.

Los Alamos is only part of the nuclear story of New Mexico. The state’s long history of uranium mining on Native American lands provides fuel for the front end of the nuclear industry. It also stores much of the radioactive waste from nuclear weapons and power plants.

To talk more about this radioactive legacy that continues into the present, we’re joined by three guests. Jay Coghlan is executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Chuck Montaño is a former investigator and auditor at Los Alamos who faced retaliation after he blew the whistle on wasteful spending and fraud at the lab. And soon we’ll be joined by Leona Morgan, a coordinator with the group Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining—their mission, to protect the water, air, land and health of communities in areas impacted by uranium mines.

Welcome, all, to Democracy Now! Let’s begin, Jay, with you. Give us a tour of where we are right now. We are sitting in the Fuller Lodge.

JAYCOGHLAN: That is correct. And to zero in nationally, here you are on this 100-city tour across the country, but, of course, today you’re not in just any town. As you put it, we’re in the birthplace of atomic and nuclear weapons. Now, specifically, we’re sitting in the historic Fuller Lodge. You invoked the name of J.R. Oppenheimer, who was director of the Manhattan Project. I recall seeing another physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics, Hans Bethe, basically the man who figured out how the sun works, through nuclear fusion. But approximately—oh, I’d say about a dozen years ago, before he died, he gave a talk here in Fuller Lodge on the abolition of nuclear weapons, for which he was an advocate, speaking to Los Alamos employees. And afterwards, I just remember him standing on the veranda here at Fuller Lodge shaking his head, going, "They just don’t understand."

AMYGOODMAN: And so, what happens here now?

JAYCOGHLAN: Well, right now, as we’ve both noted, this is the birthplace of atomic and nuclear weapons. What the public doesn’t really understand is that the nuclear weapons business is very much ongoing, that funding for nuclear weapons programs within the Department of Energy is nearly 50 percent above the historic average of the Cold War. And this is within the Department of Energy, not necessarily Pentagon funding. But again, what I’m attempting to underline is the very fact that, despite the rhetoric that this country and others are working towards a future world free of nuclear weapons, on the ground what is happening is that the U.S. is rebuilding the production side of its nuclear weapons complex. And specifically here at Los Alamos, it is for the future expanded production of the plutonium cores of nuclear weapons.

AMYGOODMAN: What’s your problem with that?

JAYCOGHLAN: Well, you know, first of all, I’m an outright advocate for the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. As the president said in Prague close to four years ago, we’re going to have to maintain those weapons while we work towards eventual global disarmament. But what’s happening through so-called life extension programs is that the U.S. is extending the service life of its nuclear weapons on the order of three decades, while endowing them with new military capabilities. And the costs, themselves, are staggering. We’re ending up with nuclear weapons that just to refurbish cost more than their weight in gold.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to actually go to President Obama. It was soon after he came into office in 2009.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: So, today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

AMYGOODMAN: "A world without nuclear weapons." Jay Coghlan?

JAYCOGHLAN: Well, you know, first of all, that is extremely laudable. But I do want to point out that this is truly a bipartisan thing. And who perhaps politically was the foremost abolitionist of all? It was Ronald Reagan. And back in the late '80s, he and Gorbachev came within inches of a bilateral deal to begin to eradicate the world, to save the world, from the scourge of nuclear weapons. Now, having said that, the thing that essentially prevented the deal were the false claims made by the nuclear weapons laboratories—in this particular case, Los Alamos's sister laboratory, Livermore in California, but false claims being made over Star Wars. And that’s essentially what prevented Reagan from finally striking a deal with Gorbachev to rid the world of nuclear weapons. But I use this to point out the ongoing role of the three nuclear weapons laboratories in this country and the inordinate and, I would say, unfavorable influence that they have, not only on national but also international nuclear weapons policies.

AMYGOODMAN: Who runs the lab now?

JAYCOGHLAN: Well, specifically, it’s being run for the government by a limited liability corporation, which of course is for-profit, which was a change since 2006. But the two dominant partners in this limited liability corporation are the Bechtel Corporation—famous, for example, for attempting to take over the water system in Bolivia, against which there was a popular uprising, so they were kicked out. But again, it’s the for-profit Bechtel Corporation and the University of California, something which is generally overlooked. But since the beginning, the University of California has been absolutely central to both the development and the ongoing continuation of nuclear weapons programs.

AMYGOODMAN: Chuck Montaño, welcome to Democracy Now! You worked here at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than three decades, for more than 30 years, coming here in 1978. You’re a whistleblower. You left about a year ago. Can you talk about what you did here, what you learned here, why you blew the whistle?

CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, my background is in audits and fraud investigations, and so I was naturally looking into the control environment at the lab, looking for unallowable costs, excessive spending, cost overruns. And, of course, my—I’m professionally bound to report things as I find them and to develop work papers that will support my findings. The problem with the Department of Energy weapons complex is that auditors that really do their jobs in accordance with their professional requirements aren’t really wanted, because there’s a concern about reporting things that could be an embarrassment to the University of California. As Jay pointed out, the University of California ran the laboratory for 60-some years by itself, until 2006, when it formed a limited liability corporation, and Bechtel brought in Bechtel, the Washington Group and BWXT as industrial partners to run the Los Alamos Lab. But essentially the university maintained a dominant position.

So, my job was to look for fraud, waste and abuse, to look for internal control weaknesses. And what I discovered was that when I reported things as I found them, my reports would get—be held up, would be watered down. Sometimes they wouldn’t be issued. Taxpayers, of course, pay the price when the laboratory, for example, has procurement arrangements to procure certain items at certain prices, and then we find that vendors are actually selling items to lab employees that lab employees aren’t supposed to be purchasing or at costs that are much higher than what was contracted. When I brought those issues to surface, I became a problem. And auditors, in general, become a problem when they do that. Back in 2003, in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee situation, there were two seasoned criminal investigators that were brought in, and—

AMYGOODMAN: Wen Ho Lee being the Chinese-American scientist here at Los Alamos who was investigated by the FBI—actually before the 2001 attacks, if people are wondering what the FBI was doing before—saying that he had given secrets to the Chinese, which he adamantly disputed.

CHUCK MONTAÑO: He had not given secrets to anybody, actually. Dr. Wen Ho Lee was scheduled to be laid off along with about a thousand lab employees in 1995. He had received what was referred to as an "at-risk notice." So at the time he—when he downloaded data, code that he had been working on, he was contemplating having to search for another job. All of that eventually came out, that that was what transpired. But that’s a—Dr. Lee is an interesting situation, because the downloading of classified information was something that I reported in one of my audit reports. That was a serious internal control weakness at the laboratory. Laboratory chose to ignore fixing that problem. Had the laboratory fixed that problem, then conceivably the Wen Ho Lee situation would have never occurred.

Later on, there were also problems with missing tapes containing classified information. One of my findings in this audit that I did of classified computing at the lab was that the laboratory did not have adequate control over the access of classified information. Vaults were basically open to anybody that wanted to go in, and they could remove items from the classified vault without anybody—without a second person as a witness and without having dual controls in place. That was one of my audit findings that’s another example where the laboratory chose to ignore some serious control issues that later on led to some serious problems with the laboratory having missing tapes, computer tapes.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about Los Alamos and the millionaires?

CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, Los Alamos—I’ve lived—I lived in Los Alamos 20 years. I grew up 45 minutes from here, in Santa Fe. We always saw Los Alamos as kind of a very elite community, largely because it’s very, very educated, and also because the laboratory pays very, very well. Normally, New Mexico is one of the poorest regions in the entire nation. So, as Los Alamos grew up and became a legitimate community in northern New Mexico, they basically—they grew up into a community of millionaires. It’s been reported repeatedly that Los Alamos has the most millionaires per capita of any community in the nation. And that’s because the laboratory pays very well. I’m not so sure the laboratory is doing any cutting-edge research anymore, since the Manhattan Project era days. But the people that come to work at the lab tend to stay until they retire, because retirement benefits are enviable. Surrounding communities, of course, are somewhat envious. There’s a line of people that would like to work at the lab, largely because of the salary and the benefits. And, of course, the laboratory tends to recruit from throughout the nation.

AMYGOODMAN: How were you retaliated against when you blew the whistle?

CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, the standard practice, of course, is to pull your responsibilities away. In my case, I had all my responsibilities removed. I was put in a cubicle. And I characterize it to a Dilbert comic book episode, where I was just sitting in a cubicle without any work to do, absolutely no assignments for a period of nine months. That changed only after I returned legal representation; it didn’t change before that. And in fact, in July of 2004, the Los Angeles Times did an article about the lab and the culture of the lab and, in that article, made reference to my situation at the time I’d been in cubicle isolation for eight months. Even after that article came out, the laboratory did not change its practices with respect to keeping me isolated without any job assignments.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you think it’s most important for people to know, both about what happened to you and about what you exposed?

CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, I think what’s imporant is that the taxpayer needs to understand, is that we’re at the front lines in terms of the employees of these institutions—the auditors, in particular, and investigators. Our job is to root out fraud, waste and abuse and to identify control weaknesses that could lead to fraud, waste and abuse. When we’re targeted for retaliation for doing our job, the taxpayer ultimately pays the price, with higher costs, cost overruns, secrets that get lost or misplaced and don’t get reported, health and environmental concern issues. You know, who’s at the front line, if not the workers, in terms of identifying risky practices that might contaminate the environment or expose workers to high risk, health and safety issues? So, whistleblower protection is critical, especially for facilities like the Los Alamos National Laboratory, because of the nature of the work that’s done and the kind of materials that they work with.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back, and we’ll also be joined by a guest from the Navajo Diné Nation to talk about another part of the nuclear cycle: the uranium mines and what happens when the mines are closed and the tailings are left. Our guests: Chuck Montaño, former inspector here at LANL, the Los Alamos National Lab, who became a whistleblower, and Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Stay with us.

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Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400After Decades of Uranium Mining, Navajo Nation Struggles With Devastating Legacy of Contaminationhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/11/after_decades_of_uranium_mining_navajo
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-11:en/story/a90e95 AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re broadcasting from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the state home to the Navajo Nation. For decades, they&#8217;ve fought uranium mining on their land. Despite a mining moratorium on tribal property, the company Hydro Resources, Inc., is seeking approval to mine near the towns of Crown Point and Church Rock. Uranium has been mined here for more than 50 years, and the impact is still felt. The land is dotted with contaminated tailings, hundreds of abandoned mines that are still not cleaned up. Meanwhile, Navajos have suffered from high cancer rates and respiratory problems.
For more, we&#8217;re joined by Leona Morgan, a coordinator with the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining—their mission: to protect the water, air, land and health of communities in areas impacted by uranium mines.
Leona, welcome to Democracy Now! We&#8217;re talking about the dawn of the Nuclear Age. We&#8217;re broadcasting from Fuller Lodge. It&#8217;s where the scientists first came in 1943, part of the secret Manhattan Project, to develop an atomic bomb. Talk about where you come from and how that, in 1943, relates to you.
LEONA MORGAN : Good morning, Amy. Well, good afternoon to people listening today in the afternoon. My name is Leona, and my family is from the Crown Point and New—Crown Point area. And right away, the first thing I think of is my dad was actually born in 1943.
But in the &#39;40s to the &#8217;80s, the Navajo Nation was mined for uranium, for the sole purpose of protecting this country through nuclear weapons development. And I guess the thing that really hits home is that, as indigenous peoples, we&#39;ve been sacrificing and giving more than we even owe to this country in order to advance its purposes. For example, Los Alamos is sitting on indigenous lands. The Tewa Women United, they talk about the agreement between the federal government and the Santa Clara Pueblo, and one of the things that was told to them is, &quot;it&#8217;s your patriotic duty to allow this entity to exist,&quot; and that &quot;we will close it as soon as we win the war.&quot; So, the same thing—our people and our language were used to create the Navajo code, which also was something to help the United States to win the war.
So, for us right now, we are still living with the effects from the mining of the 20th century. The uranium boom had caused severe impacts to the economy, our health, and of course the environment. And as indigenous peoples who live on the land and have our—all of our ways and our traditions based within our four sacred mountains, this is going to have lasting impacts not just to our culture and our health, but to future generations.
AMY GOODMAN : Leona, explain how it is uranium mines come into the Navajo lands, into the reservation.
LEONA MORGAN : Well, back in the &#8217;40s, there were no laws regulating the process, so several companies set up temporary LLCs to mine, extract uranium. And as soon as they were done, when the profit was made, a drop in the uranium price in the &#8217;80s led to hundreds of abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land and all over the country.
So, what happened was, back then, the companies targeted areas where there was uranium, and they did whatever they could to access it, whether it was signing leases with communities or with individuals. So, in our area, we&#8217;re dealing specifically with individual allotments. On Eastern Navajo—the Navajo Nation is divided into five regions. Eastern Navajo has a lot of—what we call the checkerboard area, and there&#8217;s these individual Indian allotments, which were created through the Dawes Act. And because of this individual ownership, Navajo allottees, they have the right to lease their land. And so, what the company does is they target individuals in our community, and they really, you know, use this divide-and-conquer tactic. And what they&#8217;re doing is basically promising all these riches and basically monetary gain for an already poor community that doesn&#8217;t even—a lot of our people don&#8217;t even have running water or electricity. And so, some of the individuals are dependent on this—on these promises of a false economy and jobs and all these good things that they—that they say they&#8217;re going to do.
But in reality, their project is only going to last five years, and then the rest of that will be restoration work, which will—you know, depending on what their plan is—we don&#8217;t believe that they can do restoration, and so we&#8217;re hoping that the EPA will use this opportunity to consider this old permit that they gave to the company, called an &quot;aquifer exemption.&quot; Back in the &#39;80s, HRI [Hydro Resources, Inc.] had obtained all their permits to do mining, and they&#39;ve actually had the permits this whole time, but they haven&#8217;t started. So, one of the things that they do, they basically don&#8217;t give full notification to the public. And so, it&#8217;s something that happens very often, and it happens today. It&#8217;s very common for the public to be unaware of these processes.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the effects of the uranium mines and what tailings are?
LEONA MORGAN : Yes. Tailings are the radioactive waste that results from conventional mining. And so, we&#8217;ve been inundated by a number of conventional mines and mills around northwestern New Mexico. And on Navajo, we have a number, 520 abandoned mines, but it&#8217;s actually 520 clusters, so there&#8217;s over 2,000 individual sites of abandoned uranium mines where conventional mining occurred, and they all have tailings waste, which could blow around and get in the water. You know, we have livestock, we use animals, so if the soil becomes contaminated, if the water becomes contaminated, and the plants do, you know, through ingestion and other means, we also become. So those are some of the health effects, the environmental effects, and also effects to our food sources.
But the tailings is a huge issue because, nationally, there is no long-term solution. So, in one community in Church Rock, there&#8217;s the cleanup process going on now at the Northeast Church Rock Mine, and they&#8217;re proposing to scrape up all the waste and pile it on top of existing tailings waste from an abandoned mine. It&#8217;s on top of an unlined pile, and they&#8217;re proposing to leave it there in perpetuity. And so, the community is calling for off-site removal to a certified regional repository. We don&#8217;t want 520 permanent waste sites on the Navajo Nation, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : As we wrap up this discussion, I wanted to get final comments. As you listen to Leona Morgan, Jay Coghlan, your final comments on where we stand today? President Obama is saying he wants to eliminate nuclear weapons in the world. What is happening here in the birthplace of the Nuclear Age here in Los Alamos?
JAY COGHLAN : Well, the first thing I would point out is, we have very self-interested institutions and that it&#8217;s not only a military-industrial complex. I would call it a military-industrial-academic-and-congressional complex, where you have politicians across the country, but very much so here in New Mexico, whose number one job—this is self-described—is to bring appropriations funding to the nuclear weapons labs here in New Mexico. And notice I said &quot;labs&quot; in the plural. We have another one approximately 60 miles south of us right now. So, New Mexico sites, two of the three nuclear weapons labs that this country has—
AMY GOODMAN : And they are Los Alamos National Lab...
JAY COGHLAN : And Sandia, also here in New Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN : Named for the mountains.
JAY COGHLAN : And the third one is Lawrence Livermore, about 40 miles east of San Francisco.
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s been said, if New Mexico were to secede from the United States, it would be the third most powerful nuclear nation in the world.
JAY COGHLAN : That&#8217;s correct in terms of numbers. And people who fly out of the Albuquerque airport, if you know where to look—and it&#8217;s very obscure—but if you know where to look, you can see, as you take off, about two miles south, a repository that may have up to 3,000 nuclear warheads. Now, oddly enough, it&#8217;s a good thing they&#8217;re there. Bush Sr. unilaterally retired a bunch of these weapons while there was a crisis, a possible coup in Moscow. But they&#8217;re still awaiting dismantlement.
AMY GOODMAN : Just a few seconds.
JAY COGHLAN : Yeah. And so, what we need to do, instead of building up our arsenal, which we&#8217;re doing, and extending the lives of the weapons, we need to be dismantling them and working off the backlog.
AMY GOODMAN : Chuck Montaño, final short comment?
CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, I have—I sympathize with what&#8217;s happening in the Navajo Nation with remediation. My experience here at the lab, I worked in nuclear material safeguards when I first came into the lab, and I know that a lot of material was improperly disposed of. In fact, in the early &#8217;80s, they had open pits called—out here in Area G, where, right before regulations kicked in that would require the lab to establish accounting records to keep track of what was been disposed of, the lab sent out a message lab-wide for all of the—all the different divisions to basically get all the materials that they wanted to get rid of and ship it over to Area G and toss into this open pit. And that represented cleanup.
Rocky Flats, where they produce plutonium pits—of course, the Department of Energy, which has a very poor track record of holding their contractors accountable, allowed Rocky Flats to get shut down 10 years ahead of schedule, and billions of dollars short of what it would have taken to actually clean it up. All they did there at Rocky Flats was they just changed the criteria to—in terms of what would be considered cleanup, and they left in place the plutonium contamination that basically put Denver at risk. We&#8217;re on the verge now of having that activity that was occurring there at Rocky Flats moved here to Los Alamos, the pit production part. And so, you know, I think people need to be concerned.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Leona Morgan, what you want to see?
LEONA MORGAN : Thanks, Amy. Well, something you said earlier is you referred to it as a nuclear fuel cycle. And we like to call it a &quot;nuclear fuel chain,&quot; because there is no cycle. There&#8217;s no way to, you know, recycle the waste at the end. So, being at the front end of the nuclear fuel chain, the uranium mining is extremely dangerous, and we&#8217;ve already lived with the effects. And so, basically, the U.S. EPA Region 9 and 6 are the entities dealing with us. Specifically, we&#8217;re working with Region 6. And so, I&#8217;d just like to say, the EPA and the Navajo Nation are at a critical time right now to prevent any future contamination to our drinking water sources and our people.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank all of you for being with us. Leona Morgan, coordinator with the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining. Also, thank you very much to the well-known anti-nuclear activist Jay Coghlan, and to Chuck Montaño, an inspector here the Los Alamos National Lab for more than 30 years, became a whistleblower.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . We&#8217;re broadcasting from Fuller Lodge, where the Manhattan Project first came, the secret project of the U.S. government, to develop the atomic bomb. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the state home to the Navajo Nation. For decades, they’ve fought uranium mining on their land. Despite a mining moratorium on tribal property, the company Hydro Resources, Inc., is seeking approval to mine near the towns of Crown Point and Church Rock. Uranium has been mined here for more than 50 years, and the impact is still felt. The land is dotted with contaminated tailings, hundreds of abandoned mines that are still not cleaned up. Meanwhile, Navajos have suffered from high cancer rates and respiratory problems.

For more, we’re joined by Leona Morgan, a coordinator with the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining—their mission: to protect the water, air, land and health of communities in areas impacted by uranium mines.

Leona, welcome to Democracy Now! We’re talking about the dawn of the Nuclear Age. We’re broadcasting from Fuller Lodge. It’s where the scientists first came in 1943, part of the secret Manhattan Project, to develop an atomic bomb. Talk about where you come from and how that, in 1943, relates to you.

LEONAMORGAN: Good morning, Amy. Well, good afternoon to people listening today in the afternoon. My name is Leona, and my family is from the Crown Point and New—Crown Point area. And right away, the first thing I think of is my dad was actually born in 1943.

But in the '40s to the ’80s, the Navajo Nation was mined for uranium, for the sole purpose of protecting this country through nuclear weapons development. And I guess the thing that really hits home is that, as indigenous peoples, we've been sacrificing and giving more than we even owe to this country in order to advance its purposes. For example, Los Alamos is sitting on indigenous lands. The Tewa Women United, they talk about the agreement between the federal government and the Santa Clara Pueblo, and one of the things that was told to them is, "it’s your patriotic duty to allow this entity to exist," and that "we will close it as soon as we win the war." So, the same thing—our people and our language were used to create the Navajo code, which also was something to help the United States to win the war.

So, for us right now, we are still living with the effects from the mining of the 20th century. The uranium boom had caused severe impacts to the economy, our health, and of course the environment. And as indigenous peoples who live on the land and have our—all of our ways and our traditions based within our four sacred mountains, this is going to have lasting impacts not just to our culture and our health, but to future generations.

AMYGOODMAN: Leona, explain how it is uranium mines come into the Navajo lands, into the reservation.

LEONAMORGAN: Well, back in the ’40s, there were no laws regulating the process, so several companies set up temporary LLCs to mine, extract uranium. And as soon as they were done, when the profit was made, a drop in the uranium price in the ’80s led to hundreds of abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land and all over the country.

So, what happened was, back then, the companies targeted areas where there was uranium, and they did whatever they could to access it, whether it was signing leases with communities or with individuals. So, in our area, we’re dealing specifically with individual allotments. On Eastern Navajo—the Navajo Nation is divided into five regions. Eastern Navajo has a lot of—what we call the checkerboard area, and there’s these individual Indian allotments, which were created through the Dawes Act. And because of this individual ownership, Navajo allottees, they have the right to lease their land. And so, what the company does is they target individuals in our community, and they really, you know, use this divide-and-conquer tactic. And what they’re doing is basically promising all these riches and basically monetary gain for an already poor community that doesn’t even—a lot of our people don’t even have running water or electricity. And so, some of the individuals are dependent on this—on these promises of a false economy and jobs and all these good things that they—that they say they’re going to do.

But in reality, their project is only going to last five years, and then the rest of that will be restoration work, which will—you know, depending on what their plan is—we don’t believe that they can do restoration, and so we’re hoping that the EPA will use this opportunity to consider this old permit that they gave to the company, called an "aquifer exemption." Back in the '80s, HRI [Hydro Resources, Inc.] had obtained all their permits to do mining, and they've actually had the permits this whole time, but they haven’t started. So, one of the things that they do, they basically don’t give full notification to the public. And so, it’s something that happens very often, and it happens today. It’s very common for the public to be unaware of these processes.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the effects of the uranium mines and what tailings are?

LEONAMORGAN: Yes. Tailings are the radioactive waste that results from conventional mining. And so, we’ve been inundated by a number of conventional mines and mills around northwestern New Mexico. And on Navajo, we have a number, 520 abandoned mines, but it’s actually 520 clusters, so there’s over 2,000 individual sites of abandoned uranium mines where conventional mining occurred, and they all have tailings waste, which could blow around and get in the water. You know, we have livestock, we use animals, so if the soil becomes contaminated, if the water becomes contaminated, and the plants do, you know, through ingestion and other means, we also become. So those are some of the health effects, the environmental effects, and also effects to our food sources.

But the tailings is a huge issue because, nationally, there is no long-term solution. So, in one community in Church Rock, there’s the cleanup process going on now at the Northeast Church Rock Mine, and they’re proposing to scrape up all the waste and pile it on top of existing tailings waste from an abandoned mine. It’s on top of an unlined pile, and they’re proposing to leave it there in perpetuity. And so, the community is calling for off-site removal to a certified regional repository. We don’t want 520 permanent waste sites on the Navajo Nation, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: As we wrap up this discussion, I wanted to get final comments. As you listen to Leona Morgan, Jay Coghlan, your final comments on where we stand today? President Obama is saying he wants to eliminate nuclear weapons in the world. What is happening here in the birthplace of the Nuclear Age here in Los Alamos?

JAYCOGHLAN: Well, the first thing I would point out is, we have very self-interested institutions and that it’s not only a military-industrial complex. I would call it a military-industrial-academic-and-congressional complex, where you have politicians across the country, but very much so here in New Mexico, whose number one job—this is self-described—is to bring appropriations funding to the nuclear weapons labs here in New Mexico. And notice I said "labs" in the plural. We have another one approximately 60 miles south of us right now. So, New Mexico sites, two of the three nuclear weapons labs that this country has—

AMYGOODMAN: And they are Los Alamos National Lab...

JAYCOGHLAN: And Sandia, also here in New Mexico.

AMYGOODMAN: Named for the mountains.

JAYCOGHLAN: And the third one is Lawrence Livermore, about 40 miles east of San Francisco.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s been said, if New Mexico were to secede from the United States, it would be the third most powerful nuclear nation in the world.

JAYCOGHLAN: That’s correct in terms of numbers. And people who fly out of the Albuquerque airport, if you know where to look—and it’s very obscure—but if you know where to look, you can see, as you take off, about two miles south, a repository that may have up to 3,000 nuclear warheads. Now, oddly enough, it’s a good thing they’re there. Bush Sr. unilaterally retired a bunch of these weapons while there was a crisis, a possible coup in Moscow. But they’re still awaiting dismantlement.

AMYGOODMAN: Just a few seconds.

JAYCOGHLAN: Yeah. And so, what we need to do, instead of building up our arsenal, which we’re doing, and extending the lives of the weapons, we need to be dismantling them and working off the backlog.

AMYGOODMAN: Chuck Montaño, final short comment?

CHUCK MONTAÑO: Well, I have—I sympathize with what’s happening in the Navajo Nation with remediation. My experience here at the lab, I worked in nuclear material safeguards when I first came into the lab, and I know that a lot of material was improperly disposed of. In fact, in the early ’80s, they had open pits called—out here in Area G, where, right before regulations kicked in that would require the lab to establish accounting records to keep track of what was been disposed of, the lab sent out a message lab-wide for all of the—all the different divisions to basically get all the materials that they wanted to get rid of and ship it over to Area G and toss into this open pit. And that represented cleanup.

Rocky Flats, where they produce plutonium pits—of course, the Department of Energy, which has a very poor track record of holding their contractors accountable, allowed Rocky Flats to get shut down 10 years ahead of schedule, and billions of dollars short of what it would have taken to actually clean it up. All they did there at Rocky Flats was they just changed the criteria to—in terms of what would be considered cleanup, and they left in place the plutonium contamination that basically put Denver at risk. We’re on the verge now of having that activity that was occurring there at Rocky Flats moved here to Los Alamos, the pit production part. And so, you know, I think people need to be concerned.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Leona Morgan, what you want to see?

LEONAMORGAN: Thanks, Amy. Well, something you said earlier is you referred to it as a nuclear fuel cycle. And we like to call it a "nuclear fuel chain," because there is no cycle. There’s no way to, you know, recycle the waste at the end. So, being at the front end of the nuclear fuel chain, the uranium mining is extremely dangerous, and we’ve already lived with the effects. And so, basically, the U.S. EPA Region 9 and 6 are the entities dealing with us. Specifically, we’re working with Region 6. And so, I’d just like to say, the EPA and the Navajo Nation are at a critical time right now to prevent any future contamination to our drinking water sources and our people.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank all of you for being with us. Leona Morgan, coordinator with the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining. Also, thank you very much to the well-known anti-nuclear activist Jay Coghlan, and to Chuck Montaño, an inspector here the Los Alamos National Lab for more than 30 years, became a whistleblower.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’re broadcasting from Fuller Lodge, where the Manhattan Project first came, the secret project of the U.S. government, to develop the atomic bomb. Stay with us.